Looking for the world’s hottest markets for Internet and social media activity? It’s not North America, or Europe, or even Asia. The real action is in Latin America.

ComScore recently released a study detailing some of these trends. Among the most impressive: Latin America had the fastest-growing Internet population of all regions in the world, growing 12 percent between 2012 and 2013, and reaching more than 147 million unique web visitors as of last March.

With the news headlines lately about Brazil, it’s easy for those of us outside the region to get caught up in the image of a country going through a difficult, turbulent period. But it’s important to consider that what’s happening now in Brazil is ultimately a sign of positive change: an expanding middle class with higher expectations about the rewards they should reap from the country’s growing economy.

And in fact, that story—the tremendous economic growth happening in Brazil—is one of the more amazing pieces of good news from around the globe.

Changing global demographics are going to boost mobile broadband adoption significantly, according to a recent presentation by Wally Swain, senior vice president of the network research group at Yankee Group. Swain not only leads the emerging markets team, he has a front-row seat to emerging markets from his office in Bogotá, Colombia.

In his presentation, entitled “Fixed and Mobile Broadband Compete and Cooperate in Emerging Markets,” Swain revealed some intriguing insights about where mobile broadband is headed: nowhere but up.

The balance of power is shifting to emerging economies. Compared to stagnant Western markets, business growth and investment in the Middle-East, Africa and Russia (MEAR) continues unabated.

It’s a shift that’s amplified by technological advances. In under a decade, these seismic changes have levelled the playing field, opened the door to a global market and made rapid business growth a reality:

The connected world where we can work, play and learn anytime, anywhere and with anyone.

Virtualization made it easier to manage multiple servers and reduce physical computing power.

Computing power has exponentially increased capacity and processing speeds so we can do much more for a lot less time and money.

The cloud offers all the applications and storage businesses need minus the server infrastructure.

You’ll probably point out many other factors, but I picked these because they are particularly relevant to MEAR countries and their IT spending patterns. Specifically, they are backed up by Forrester research in 2012. This showed that over half of MEAR-based companies plan to invest more in mobility, analytics, security and collaboration.

Unlike more mature companies, their spending isn’t being eroded by having to maintain and support legacy systems. This frees up budgets to completely replace or expand their IT in ways that improve their competitiveness. The top three areas that Forrester highlighted from 2011 to 2012 were mobile apps (spending increase of 47%), business intelligence (44%) and collaboration tools (41%).

Further research was carried out by Canalys in February 2012 of its online channel community – resellers, systems integrators, service providers and distributors. The results showed a positive outlook across MEAR despite ongoing economic uncertainty. Over half emphasized a move from capital expenditure to operating expenditure, with the highest demand for IT services expected from small to midsize companies (with 100-499 employees). As a respondent said, “Companies working their way out of the crisis by expanding.”

As more companies seek new technologies to secure future growth, our partner network across MEAR needs to be ready to help them become the technology leaders of tomorrow.

It’s unlikely that billions of people would be online; myself included. The web would be less robust, not as social and we probably wouldn’t be on the verge of The Internet of Everything – and the endless possibilities it will create.

We haven’t spent the last 27 years only building technology. By enabling businesses with the right tools and helping to connect 1.2 billion workers, we’ve stayed at the forefront of building entrepreneurial capacity worldwide. Our networks enable people to work better, and keep in touch anywhere and at any time. And now we’re playing our part in connecting an estimated 50 billion machines and devices by 2020*.

Against a backdrop of global recession, we’re supporting emerging economies and the next generation of entrepreneurs. In fact, across the Middle-East, Africa and Russia (MEAR) a staggering 37% of the population is under 15 years old – the consumers, business people and leaders of the near future – and 47% are living in urban environments. These are all statistics that I’m personally very excited about, as they provide massive opportunities.

As well as the sheer scale, the diversity, infrastructure challenges and newness of these markets mean that mobility and collaboration are absolutely key to business growth. So with that in mind our partner-led activity in MEAR is vital to our overall success – MEAR is simply an unmissable and untapped channel. And our network of 2,100 partners and 10,000 partner account managers across 84 countries are vital to catching this wave.

I want 2013 to be a fresh start for supporting our partner-led activities. We’ve proved we can transcend national, geographical and cultural boundaries to build strong relationships. That’s exactly what we need to do with our partners, starting now.

So please feel free to share your thoughts and comments on how we can work more productively together with our partners.

*The Internet of Things: How the Next Evolution of the Internet Is Changing Everything, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), 2011

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